Chapter Six

 

Richard

 

His longtime partner. Was Flora really my “partner”? My girlfriend, yes. The woman who had been essentially chosen for me to marry when I was just a child to complete some social Circle of Life that I had no idea about at the time, yes. My partner? I’m not so sure. We were great at doubles tennis.

I was still stuck on that phrase as I listened to the lawyer I had chosen go over all of the legal details about the arrangement. I had heard the spiel a few times already that day. He was pretty amazing at being able to repeat the same information in exactly the same words and tone six times. The sheer volume of that information had had the effect that I both expected and wanted in most of the women who had come into the room. They seemed perky and enthusiastic when they first came in, took a moment to process that it wasn’t the couple they thought they were going to meet waiting for them in the office, and then listened as Mr. Lawrence started outlining the expectations and responsibilities of the arrangement, the fees and financial support being offered, the guidelines we had, and the legal protections being put into place to guard both sides.

Most of the women fared pretty well through the first few paragraphs that he delivered. They would listen with what looked like rapt attention, nodding politely and making those sounds that self-help gurus and life coaches tell people to make so that the person speaking will know that they are being heard and acknowledged. After a few more minutes, right about when he started talking about medical expectations and lifestyle guidelines, the smiles on their faces started getting a little plastic, their eyes became glassy, and the noises that they were making no longer coordinated with anything in particular that the lawyer was saying. One of them stood up in the middle of the speech, announced that her dog needed to be brought to the groomer and that she was so sorry but would have to withdraw her interest because she just remembered how much time it took to take care of him. Another let him finish, but walked out of the office without saying another word. The other three made it through and tried to ask questions about all of the information with varying degrees of understanding and sense.

Then there was Rue. I had barely recognized her when she walked into the office and I saw her appear on the computer screen. Gone were sweat pants and sweat shirt, replaced by tasteful clothes that accentuated a body with incredible curves that had been all but hidden by the loungewear. Her hair had been brushed and even though it was coiled on the back of her head again, it was smooth and shiny, looking deliberately styled rather than just thrown into place to get it out of her way. The makeup she wore was distinctive, with bold eyeliner making her almost golden eyes stand out and the slick of bright red lipstick just contrasting enough with the pink of her shirt that it looked deliberate. She had been beautiful even when I first saw her, but being put together this way made her stunning in another way.

I’m honestly not sure which one I prefer.

Rue listened all the way through the explanation from the lawyer and I noticed that she didn’t seem intimidated or overwhelmed by him or the flow of information. She even interjected her own questions and comments throughout the way, some of which made the lawyer cringe but brought a smile to my lips. This woman seemed unfazed by anything that was thrown at her. She didn’t seem fragile like the other women, as though if a single thing was to go wrong in the process she would fall apart, but also didn’t seem cold or distant. She was unwaveringly present in the moment, right there, listening to the lawyer and involving herself as much in the conversation as she could.

“What do you think of her now?” I asked Flora.

She was reluctantly sitting beside me, examining her nail polish more than she was paying attention to the screen and what was happening in the next office over. I saw her give a cursory glance and then she shrugged.

“I guess she’s alright,” she said.

“You do realize that she’s the woman you said was so horrible when you saw her last week? You were completely offended by her clothes and thought that she had no business even showing interest in this – but you thought that I was showing more than enough interest?”

Flora made a face at me and I was struck, as I so frequently was, by how much she reminded me of a spoiled little girl in the shell of a grown-up woman. Part of me hated that that was the way that I perceived her. I wanted to feel what I knew I should be feeling for her, at least what I thought -I should be feeling. I wanted to look at her the way that I saw other couples look at each other when we went to events together and saw them holding hands, walking with their arms around each other’s waists, and leaning in to whisper to one another, smiling and giggling at what each other said. Flora and I weren’t like that. We walked around the events together, of course, and we looked fantastic doing it. She was a gorgeous woman, primped and perfected, and she looked wonderful draped on my arm wherever we went. But there was none of that warmth between us. We didn’t exist in our own secret little world the way that the other couples seemed to. Sometimes I longed for that kind of connection, wishing that we had the sizzle of passion and tenderness of such obvious love. There were other times, though, when I wondered if what I was seeing in them was no more valid than what we had, only fresher and newer.

Many of the couples had only been together a short time and were still riding that high that came with discovering the spark of new love. Flora and I had been together for so long, or guided into a pseudo-relationship in convenient situations that our parents thought that we wouldn’t recognize for what they were, that it was almost impossible for me to think of a time when she wasn’t around. Perhaps we had just been a part of each other’s lives for so long that there wasn’t room left for those kinds of feelings.

 

****

Rue

 

“Alright, so we know that he lives around here because the lawyer was so adamant about him needing to protect his privacy, and that wouldn’t be a big deal if he lived somewhere else.”

“Not necessarily,” Tessie said.

“What do you mean?”

“The lawyer said that this guy is a prominent businessman. Powerful men like that can be pretty well-known all over, not just where they live.”

“I don’t know.”

“You know who Bill Gates is and he doesn’t live around here,” Christopher pointed out.

“I don’t think that Bill Gates is considering hiring someone to carry his child,” I said. “Besides, he’s married. The lawyer was very particular to point out that this man has a girlfriend he’s planning on marrying.”

“Probably for the best,” Christopher said. “If it was Bill Gates he would be seriously cheaping out with that surrogacy fee.”

I nodded solemnly and opened the first website on the results that had popped up from my search.

“What do you think?” I asked, gesturing at the screen. “He’s the right age. It looks like he has several businesses.”

“Married,” Tessie said, pointing out a line on the About Us page.

“Dammit.”

I went back and opened another page.

“OK, how about this one. Not married. Successful.”

“Gorgeous,” Tessie said.

“That wasn’t specified in the description from the lawyer,” I said. I looked at the screen again and nodded. “But you are not wrong.”

The man smiling from the screen had a chiseled face and thick, sandy hair that accentuated piercing blue eyes.

Wow.

“So, when are you supposed to meet him?”

“Well,” I said, still staring at the image of the man who could possibly be the father of the child that I would soon be pregnant with. That was an interesting thought. “Since the last time that I thought that I was going to meet him I ended up sitting with a lawyer while he tried to confuse and scare me into giving up, so I’m not really sure. In theory, though, I meet them tomorrow.”

“They aren’t waiting around, are they?”

“What are you going to wear?” Christopher asked.

I sighed deeply and shook my head.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all day. It took me hours to figure out that one outfit. I’m not prepared for another.”

 

The next morning, I strode across the lobby and was passing through the first set of glass doors when Ellery crossed through the second toward me. I smiled, pleased with myself for getting the jump on him.

“Not late today,” I said.

He looked at his watch.

“One minute.”

“Dammit.” I winced. “I mean darn it.”

“This way,” he said, giving me the same type of glare that the Sunday school teacher gave every time I came in with muddy shoes because I ran through the yard before going in. “They’re waiting for you.”

“Already?” I asked. “I’m only one minute late.”

“Their time is very important,” Ellery said. “They don’t have the option of just waiting around for people.”

“And yet, they are waiting for me,” I said, walking through the waiting room toward the door. “I must be pretty special.”

I got to the office and stopped outside of the closed door. All of the nervousness that I had had the day before came rushing back, augmented now by the extra day that I had had to sit around and worry about meeting them. Ellery came up beside me and stared at the door for a few moments. He pointed to the doorknob with the end of his pen.

“You can just use that right there,” he said.

I swung my head to look at him.

“You didn’t get many hugs as a child, did you?” I asked.

He glared at me and opened the door. I stepped into the office and felt my heart flutter slightly when I saw the man from my computer screen smiling back at me from behind the desk.

“Hello,” he said, standing up and reaching a hand across the desk toward me. “You’re Rue.”

I nodded, approaching him and taking his hand.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Richard.”

I glanced around the office, expecting to see the blond woman who had been pictured in the society pages Christopher and I had shamelessly pored through the night before.

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said.

“Flora will be joining us later, hopefully,” he said, sitting down and gesturing toward the chair across from him. “She had a few other appointments this morning.”

“Oh,” I said.

I wanted to point out to him that I hadn’t seen any other women in the waiting room and ask if that meant that he had chosen me, but that seemed a little desperate to me, so I restrained myself.

“I’m sorry about the bait-and-switch situation yesterday. This is a really important decision for me. For us. And I want to make sure I make the right one.”

I nodded.

“I totally understand. Is there anything else that you want to know?”

Stop staring at him. Stop staring at him. Stop staring at him. You cannot be attracted to him. You cannot be attracted to him.

Richard looked down at the papers on his desk and flipped through them, his eyes scanning over them in the quickly flickering moves of speed reading that always made me feel dizzy just watching. He finished and looked up at me.

“There are just a couple of questions that I want to ask you.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Anything you want to know. I’m an open book.”

Probably a slightly crinkled paperback by an author you would never read, but an open book nonetheless.

He looked at me for a few long seconds. He opened his mouth as if to ask something and then closed it, waiting for another few seconds.

“What is your favorite planet and why?” he asked.

“Earth because I live here and it’s the only one that we are currently aware of capable of sustaining life without the use of extensive technology, I’ve seen Biodome. I don’t want to be a part of any of that. If Earth’s not an option, I’ll say Jupiter because it’s huge but gets overlooked by all the Mars-lovers out there and I feel that it needs more attention.”

 

****

Richard

 

She didn’t miss a beat.

“If you were an ice cream sundae topping, which would you be?”

“Chopped nuts.”

“Why?”

“Because they add texture and make a sundae more interesting. Besides, all the syrup makes them super delicious, but they’re still nuts, so they’re healthy. That way after people eat the sundae, they might feel guilty about the other toppings and the ice cream, but they won’t feel as terrible about the chopped nuts. I would make it a little easier for people to enjoy a treat.”

“How many roller coasters have you ridden in your life and did you keep your hands up the entire time?”

Rue paused only for a second, her eyes looking up as if she was seeing something in her mind.

“Ten. Some of them yes.”

“Don’t you know that that’s dangerous?”

“No, it isn’t. Roller coasters only have the illusion of being dangerous. That’s why they’re fun. They’re designed to make your subconscious believe that you are facing some sort of life-threatening situation involving a crashing vehicle or a large monster thrashing you around in its teeth. In reality, though, they are completely safe and have only the slightest risk of malfunction that would actually result in injury.”

“And danger is your middle name,” I teased.

“It could be. But it’s not. It’s Bella.”

“Bella?” I asked, waiting for her to laugh or to at least tell me that she was joking. “Your name is Rue Bella?”

Not laughing. Oh, my lord, she’s serious.

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

I laughed at the serious look on her face and nodded.

“Fair enough. Alright. One more question. A cat and three dogs walk down an alley and see a bowl of food. What color collar was the animal that got the food wearing?”

“White with little fish, clearly.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it was obviously the cat that got the food. Cats always beat out dogs. Just the way it is. They’re sneaky and they have pointy fingers. Of course, the cat didn’t eat all the food and shared what was left with a dog that was wearing pink rhinestone collar.”

“Because?”

“Bitches always get what they want.”

I threw back my head and laughed, both shocked and enthralled by her answer.

And her.

“What exactly is going on here?”

The sound of Flora’s frosty voice stopped my laughter and I looked at her where she stood at the door.

“Oh, Darling, you made it. This is Rue. I was just asking her a few questions.”

“I can’t imagine what you would have asked her that would have warranted an answer like that.”

I realized that she had heard Rue’s comment and felt a little hint of guilt. Flora had trusted me to run the interview on my own until she got there, and I felt like I had somehow let her down with the questions I’d chosen.

Not that it really matters. Rue is the one. There isn’t anyone else who I even want to consider.

I tried to explain the exchange, but Flora didn’t seem impressed.

“I thought that you were going to ask her things that pertain to the arrangement,” she said.

She was still standing beside the door, looking like she was preparing to escape and run away at any moment. I walked around the side of the desk and took her hands, kissing both.

“I am,” I told her. “Don’t you want to know that the woman we choose to carry our baby can think quickly and has a creative mind?”

“I’m not sure that her creativity has anything to do with her ability to get pregnant and deliver a child,” Flora said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rue’s eyes narrow briefly at Flora before she turned back around to look across the desk again.

This was getting off to a great start.

“I think it does,” I told her. “It means that she will be adaptable to whatever situations might occur, and less likely to close her mind to ideas that we might have about her prenatal care and birthing situation.”

“Ideas?” Rue asked from behind me. “What kind of ideas?’

“So, I suppose that you’re settled on her?” Flora asked. “None of the other women fit your standards?”

“The other women did not make it through this phase.”

I would try to explain the whole situation to her when we got home later.

I expected Flora to get angry. I knew that she didn’t like Rue. She didn’t trust her and thought that she was below her. It was obvious just in the way that she looked at her. But instead, she offered a smile and walked around me to where Rue was sitting.

“It’s wonderful to meet you, Rue,” she said. She reached a hand toward Rue, who looked at her for a few unsure seconds and then took her hand cautiously. Flora pulled her to her feet and wrapped Rue into a hug that was so out of character for her I felt the need to take a step back. “Thank you so much for being willing to do this. You are an angel for giving of yourself so much to help make a dream come true for me and for my Richie.”